Gordievsky was taken home, but Grushko confronted him at the KGB the next day. Gordievsky was told his London posting was over, but he would be allowed to remain in a non-sensitive KGB department in Moscow. It was apparent that Soviet counterintelligence agents did not yet have enough evidence to arrest him.
Gordievsky believes they were waiting to catch him contacting British intelligence. But it was only a matter of time. His escape plan was bound under the flyleaf of a novel; he had to slit the cover open to read the instructions. He did so, but nothing happened. He tried again, following the fallback plan, and this time a man carrying a dark-green bag from Harrods, the upscale London department store, walked by eating a candy bar. It was the signal to launch his escape. From a Moscow railroad station, he made his way by train, bus and taxi to a point near the Finnish-Soviet border, where he hid in some grass by the roadside until two cars stopped.
Although Gordievsky has written that he climbed into the trunk of one of the cars, a former CIA officer says he actually crawled into a space in a specially modified Land Rover. Had the Russians examined the car, they would have seen the hump on the floor where the driveshaft would normally be.
They drove through several checkpoints with no trouble, but they had to stop at Soviet customs when they reached the border. When the driver turned off the engine, Gordievsky could hear dogs close by—Alsatians, he later learned. Minutes passed. His fear mounted. He started having trouble breathing. The women fed the dogs potato chips to distract them. He was free. He asked for a fictitious Greek employee. Five days after Bokhan received the cable about his son, he took his wife, Alla, and their year-old daughter, Maria, to the beach.
He had never told his wife that he was working for the CIA—it would have put her in mortal danger—but now he had to say something. As they walked on the beach that Saturday, he said his career was in trouble. Would she ever live in the West? He dropped it, sensing that he was getting into dangerous territory. They had a sumptuous lunch—Bokhan knew it might be his last meal with his family—and Maria bought a stuffed Greek doll called a patatuff.
After they drove home, he packed a gym bag and announced that he was going for a jog. Then he kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. Reiser was waiting in a car at the other end. In the back seat were a jacket, hat and sunglasses. Bokhan put them on as Reiser drove to a safe house. After dark they left for a small airport, where Bokhan boarded a CIA plane.
After stops in Madrid and Frankfurt, a military jet flew him across the Atlantic. At Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland he looked out the window and saw several black cars and people on the tarmac. He asked if they were there to greet an important diplomat.
The agency cautioned that it would be too risky for him to bring that much cash through the airport and told him the money would be in Moscow, stashed inside a fake rock. The Soviets had arranged for the apparent good news to reach his wife through a friend and former co-worker in Moscow, who wrote to her in Lagos.
Poleshchuk was lured back to his fate. Leonid never made it to the rock, his son said. A Russian TV documentary shows a shadowy figure picking it up, but Andrei said it is an actor, not his father.
In June , Leonid was tried and, predictably, convicted. Andrei was allowed to visit him in prison only once, after he was sentenced to death. He was thin, pale and obviously sick. He was like a walking dead man. I could sense he had been tortured. In the history of U. Just the day before, Moscow had announced that a Soviet defense researcher named Adolf G. Tolkachev had been arrested as a CIA spy.
One news account said he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck. Hanssen, who was arrested in In spying for Moscow on and off over 22 years, Hanssen revealed dozens of secrets, including the eavesdropping tunnel the FBI had dug under the Soviet Embassy in Washington and the identities of two FBI sources within the embassy, who were also executed.
Hanssen, who was convicted of espionage, is serving a life sentence in the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. The resettled spy told Wiser he was convinced Ames had betrayed him, but he confirmed that he had been abruptly summoned back to Moscow on May 17, —almost four weeks before Ames said he named him to the KGB. Wiser acknowledges that Ames may have lied or been mistaken about the date—Ames has conceded that he drank heavily before his meetings with the KGB.
He did so, he said, to prove his bona fides as a potential KGB mole. For those who are betrayed, the damage persists long after the initial shock passes. A few days after Oleg Gordievsky was recalled to Moscow, the KGB flew his wife, Leila, and their two daughters there, and he broke the unwelcome news that they would not be posted back to London.
After Gordievsky escaped, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. He underwent a debriefing by MI6 and cooperated with it and other Western intelligence services. He always hoped Leila would join him in England. She did, in , but the strain caused by six years of separation proved too much to repair. By their marriage was over. Sergei Bokhan was also separated from his family for six years. Within two weeks after his flight to the United States, he had a new name, a fake background, a Social Security number and a 9-millimeter Beretta.
He stayed in safe houses in Virginia at first, then lived half a year in California to learn English, moved back East and consulted for the CIA and some U. When Bokhan escaped from Athens, the KGB hustled his wife back to Moscow, searched her apartment and began a series of interrogations. Everyone avoided me. If I was waiting for the elevator, they went down the stairs.
I had no job. When I found a job, the KGB called and they fired me. That happened several times. Finally, in , with the KGB in disarray after its chief led the failed coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the authorities let Alla and her daughter leave. Kennedy International Airport. Both of them, along with ten other Russians he betrayed in the ensuing years, were executed. Tipped off at first by the executions, in CIA investigators began searching for a mole within the agency.
Ames stayed off their radar, however, for several years, while the search highlighted two other CIA insiders, an agent who had defected in , and a Marine security guard who was convicted in of espionage at the U. Embassy in Moscow.
Between and three more double agents based in Washington disappeared, and investigators confirmed that neither of their potential suspects could be blamed. Aldrich Ames's name made the bureau's short list of 20 suspects, but he passed two polygraph tests. He was placed in a counternarcotics division, though he managed to continue his espionage activities almost as easily as he had in the past. This time, however, the FBI was watching closely. In they gained permission to tap Ames's phone and secretly install cameras and bugs throughout his house and inside his computer.
Through the bugs in his house, the FBI learned that Ames had lied about a personal vacation in October Though he said he was traveling to Colombia to visit his wife's family, the bugs revealed that he had had a meeting in Caracas, Venezula.
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